Understanding the Impacts of Top-Tier Streamer De-Emphasizing in Live Streaming E-Commerce: A Social Evolution Game Perspective

Abstract

Live-streaming e-commerce has achieved significant growth by combining live interactive broadcasts with online shopping, with platform revenues largely depending on a small number of top-tier streamers. However, this dependence grants these top-tier streamers excessive bargaining power and makes platforms vulnerable to their negative impacts. To address this issue, this study aims to provide strategy recommendations for live-streaming e-commerce platform managers to reduce reliance on top-tier streamers. We achieve this goal by constructing a social evolutionary game model (SEGINE). This model utilizes real-world data from Chinese social media and live-streaming e-commerce platforms to simulate the diffusion process of live-streamed product information within social networks and analyzes the impact of different “de-emphasize top-tier streamers” strategies on information dissemination. By integrating the characteristics of live-streaming platforms and social networks, we consider the effects of indirect network externalities on evolutionary game dynamics, thereby providing a basis for platform managers to formulate relevant decisions. The experimental results show that appropriately limiting the influence of top-tier streamers may help build a healthier and more sustainable live-streaming e-commerce ecosystem. The novelty of this study lies in its first-time application of a social evolutionary game model to analyze the interaction between live-streaming e-commerce platforms and social networks, and to explore the potential impacts of strategies that de-emphasize top-tier streamers.